\n
Though the sale price has not been made public, it has been reported that it is $500m (\u00a3390m).<\/p>\n
Mr Toon said he would not “go into any of the speculation” around the sums of money involved.<\/p>\n
But he did concede that the valuation of tech firms in general “have been up and down”.<\/p>\n
“We’ve certainly seen a lot of other companies, their values have dropped and investors have taken appropriate cautious decisions about how they value investments on their books. <\/p>\n
“Hopefully, as a result of this deal, we’ll see big investment and huge progress for Graphcore together with SoftBank.”<\/p>\n
Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Mr Troon and Simon Knowles – its computer chips, the Colossus series, allow for powerful computer processing.<\/p>\n
However it has struggled with slowing sales since its bumper 2020 valuation, and announced in 2022 that it had closed offices in Norway, Japan and South Korea.<\/p>\n
Then in 2023, major tech investor Sequoia Capital said it had entirely written off the value of its stake in the company.<\/p>\n
That was a major disappointment considering, at one point, Graphcore was seen as a potential competitor to Nvidia in the AI space.<\/p>\n
Its would-be rival has grown significantly in value and briefly this year held the title of the most valuable company in the world.<\/p>\n
“I think this is actually good news for UK tech and Graphcore,” said Dan Ridsdale, head of technology at Edison Group. <\/p>\n
“Nvidia has carved out a dominant position in Generative AI… but there are other opportunities within AI and the industry will need viable competitors.<\/p>\n
“But Graphcore will need substantial capital – it is a positive that Graphcore has found an investor willing to take the risk and provide the capital to put it in the mix.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Published at Thu, 11 Jul 2024 23:02:57 +0000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pioneering British AI chip designer bought by Japanese firm Getty Images Tom Gerken Technology reporter Zoe Kleinman Technology editor 24 minutes ago British artificial intelligence (AI) chip firm Graphcore – once considered a potential rival to market leader Nvidia – has been bought by a Japanese conglomerate. Softbank has not disclosed how much it paid… Continue reading Pioneering British AI chip designer bought by Japanese firm<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/260web.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/picture><\/span>Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n